Affording a spaceship?

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

I've never seen the show. I know, don't tar and feather me or take away my nerd card. I can't forgive Whedon for putting 50 some habitable planets in a single star system.

It's not hard to ignore that, and just assume it's several star systems. In fact, it works better with the stories they tell.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by RyanW

It's not hard to ignore that, and just assume it's several star systems. In fact, it works better with the stories they tell.

Yes, ignoring what happens on the show does make it easier to believe some of the other details of said show. But really, that doesn't make it more palatable to me.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Yes, ignoring what happens on the show does make it easier to believe some of the other details of said show. But really, that doesn't make it more palatable to me.

No, seriously, the mention of everything being in one solar system is a quick voice over and pretty much never mentioned again. For the rest of the show all you know of their travels is that they travel, there's no real mention if it's FTL, STL, or Magic Flying Carpets. At any rate, if you're going to hate without actually sampling then you're going to hate, and it sounds like you're spending more effort trying to find a reason to hate the show without having actually watched it than it's worth to try to change your mind on the subject.

[the_matrix_walker]

It's actually a funky quinternary star system.

http://i.imgur.com/M7HsV.jpg

[Agemegos]

Oh dear!

Sometimes when you are in a hole you ought to stop digging.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by the_matrix_walker

It's actually a funky quinternary star system.

http://i.imgur.com/M7HsV.jpg

Are those orbits really as well-synchronised as multiple rotors on a helicopter?

[Ragabash Moon]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Are those orbits really as well-synchronised as multiple rotors on a helicopter?

Very possibly... it's implied that when they first arrived in the system they had terraforming technology and that's why there is so many habitable planets, but as they moved out from the core... it got harder and harder to terraform, since the original people that built the ships that left "Earth that Was" were long dead? I'm not 100% sure as while I am a fan of the show itself, I've not read any of the books and such that explain all the nuances...

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Ragabash Moon

So, the average character in a Space campaign has no way of ever affording a ship without spending 100 points (or more) for wealth and then blowing it all on a ship...

So, how are you supposed to allow for players in a space campaign to have a ship?

One school of "thought" is that the GM decides whether the PC party starts the campaign owning a ship, and if so, which type of ship, and what modifications, if any, it has.



My take on it is that it makes sense, in RPG character creation system design, to allow for the possibility of characters starting out with very expensive (and usually large) single items, which are hard to sell, and almost impossible to sell real fast unless you give an insane discount. Examples include owning a home, or indeed a vehicle such as a spaceship or a sea ship. Examples of non-large items include state-of-the-art cyberdecks, and permanent magic items.

If such items must be purchased using the standard wealth/starting equipment budget rules, then they are guaranteed to "happen", in the sense of players voluntarily and freely (without "hints" or more overt pressure from the GM) going for such options. And since it is desirable for player characters to start the campaign owning such items fairly often, certainly more often than once-in-a-hyper-rare-while, it is merely good game design, thoughtful game design, to include such options in the character creation rules.



A third option is for the player characters to pool resources to own a huge item. And by pool I mean non-linear synergies. That's what I opted for in Modern Action RPG, with pooled vehicle ownership, so that the PCs would be able to collectively own a sea ship or similar (or, of course, a space ship for the planned science fiction-themed expansion), with players opting out of it not contributing points towards the vehicle, and thus not having any formal say in how the vehicle is utilized during the campaign.

Here, it makes a lot of sense to provide easy "access" to ownership of off-the-shelf hulls, and charge more points for "modified" or "upgraded" hulls. And by "upgraded", added firepower (or even adding firepower to a civilian hull) is likely to be a very popular option.



A fourth option is to say that the ship isn't actually owned, but is instead mortgaged, and its full cost must be paid with monies earned during the campaign, i.e. over time. GURPS Space 2nd and 3rd Edition has some quick-and-dirty percentage values for that (you pay off X percent over 8 years, or Y percent over 12 years, and it's usually the worldbuilder's choice, as to what kind of mortgages the market will accept). I can't recall if Space 4th Edition has the same material. It doesn't quite fit ind. But if not, it's probably in GURPS Spaceships, either in the core PDF or in the 2nd volume. And if you don't have any of that, then if you ask, some kind person can probably provide you with the necessary figures from Space 2/3 (even me, assuming I notice your request).



A fifth, used in Moongoose's version of Traveller, is to divide each ship up into standard-sized "shares". IIRC MongTraveller uses something like 1 MegaCredit per share, so the cost of one ship might be 52 shares and another ship might cost 131 shares. One of the end-of-career benefits that characters can roll is shares in various ships.

In this way, player characters can own some shares of the ship, while any remaining shares must be paid off with interest, or maybe just paid interest on without any actual paying-down (depending on the financial climate of the world in which the campaign takes place).

So, say a ship costs 120 shares. One PC buys 30 shares during character creation, and each of the other five PCs buys 10. That leaves 40 shares on which interest must be paid, and nominally the first PC has 3 times as much say as any of the others, in terms of what to do with the ship.

With 1 Megacredit per share, a reasonable interest on a highly mobile asset might be 15% per year, or 1.25% per month, so 12.5k credits per month per share. With 40 shares that demand interest, that's half a million per month, or 6 million per year. On a ship costing 120 million, but which is 2/3 owned by its crew.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Stripe

Agreed. If, as the GM, I wanted the players to have a ship and there to be a captain of that ship, then one of the players would take that role.

As a wise man once said, a ship isn't just a hull, engines, meteor defences and so forth. A ship is freedom.

If you as a GM gets to decide what kind of things the players' characters own at gamestart, why stop there? Why not also decide who they're going to be, what kinds of characters? Why not create their characters for them? Why not play their characters for them too?

Heck, why have players at all? If you want to create a story, sit down and write a novel!

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by fifiste

It seems sig.gear has really terrible CP tp $ ratio to buy big things like ships.

The implementation of Signature Gear in GURPS 4th Edition is ****ed up. Stupidly ****ed up.